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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Mrs Sharon Hodgson)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I am very grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Mary Kelly Foy) and the hon. Member for Wokingham (Clive Jones) for raising this important matter and securing the debate. They both spoke about their own breast cancer journeys very powerfully, and I thank them for sharing their personal experiences with us.
It is also personal to me, having gone through it not myself, but through my mother-in-law, who we lost to breast cancer almost 30 years ago. She was just 62, which is not much older than I am now. Thirty years ago, that age seemed a long way off, but now that I am 60, it does not seem very old at all. My father-in-law, who is in his nineties, is still with us, which made me realise how much life this terrible disease robbed her of. Her secondary breast cancer—like that of my hon. Friend the Member for West Lancashire (Ashley Dalton)—was diagnosed 10 years after her primary breast cancer. That struck me and brought it back to mind. I was thinking how glad and happy I am that the treatment now is so much better than it was 30 years ago, and that my hon. Friend is very much still alive and kicking—and in great voice, as we have all heard today.
Losing my mother-in-law at such a young age spurred me on, as a new MP in 2005, to join the all-party parliamentary group on breast cancer. I went on to be an officer and then chair for a number of years. Now that I am in government, I feel an immense responsibility resting on my shoulders. I want to do the right thing not just in memory of my mother-in-law, but for all hon. Members who have shared their stories and those of constituents and campaigners, and for all those I have met since I was first elected to Parliament.
This has been a very moving and informative debate, with so many excellent speeches from hon. Members. I particularly commend my predecessor as Public Health and Prevention Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for West Lancashire, for her fantastic work on the national cancer plan. It was all the better for being led by someone not just with lived experience, but who was actually in the middle of her cancer treatment at the same time. How she was able to do that—there is a huge workload in this brief—on top of her treatment, while at the same time driving progress on the 10-year health plan, the HIV action plan and the men’s health plan, is testament to how focused, tough and brilliant she is. I am not afraid to admit that following in her footsteps is a challenge. I am thrilled that she is with us today, and we all witnessed her brilliance at first hand in her speech.
I want to come to the substance of the issues that hon. Members have raised. If I run out of time, or if there is anything that I miss, I and my officials will write to hon. Members, so they should not think that I have just ignored what they said. It will be responded to in due course.
I want to start with data. The more data we collect, the more we can empower patients to make informed choices about their care, but it is not just about giving patients a clearer picture, important though that is. The Government made data one of the five big bets of our 10-year health plan—I think that is the right terminology—because the NHS is a data superpower. Just as coal was the fuel of the first industrial revolution, data will power the life sciences revolution, and we can use datasets to help scientists make further breakthroughs in cancer research.
Better data is also important for researchers to understand the number of cohorts they have to work with. It is important for NHS commissioners, who will have a clearer idea of patient demand. We cannot improve something that we cannot measure. In the words of Jo Taylor, the late founder of METUPUK,
“We are only counted when we are dead”,
and that is just unacceptable. As part of Jo’s legacy, we now have a specific commitment in our national cancer plan to begin collecting data for recurrent cancers, starting with metastatic breast cancer. I pay tribute once again to my hon. Friend the Member for West Lancashire for personally making sure that that commitment was there. Now that I have picked up her baton, as I said, I am determined to make sure we can make good on that promise.
The national disease registration service is working with NHS trusts to improve their reporting of non-primary cancers in the cancer outcomes and services dataset. I can update the House today that since the publication of the national cancer plan, the NDRS has made the collection and reporting of secondary breast cancer a key priority. It is co-ordinating with all partners, charities, teams of experts and trusts to properly collect data on secondary breast cancers at source. It is helping trusts to improve the way they collect data for things like disease progression, recurrence and metastatic spread.
In the meantime, the NDRS is teaming up with researchers at the University of Oxford to develop a new algorithm. This infers the numbers of metastatic disease by combining multiple routine datasets. In plain English, what it means is this: trusts routinely report all sorts of data to NHS England—imaging, chemo, radiotherapy. All that data comes into NHSE from different places across the country. It can then be linked to give us a good idea on numbers until we can get an even clearer picture through trust reporting.
We are already off to a good start because data was already starting to improve under this Government, even before the national cancer plan was published. Consecutive audits of metastatic breast cancer by the National Cancer Audit Collaborating Centre, or NATCAN, cover a greater number of people living with metastatic breast cancer. Data coverage of metastatic breast cancer is already improving, and the NDRS will also publish a baseline assessment of incidence and prevalence and the total number of people living with metastatic breast cancer by the end of this year. It will be the best assessment we have ever had.
Cancer patients deserve to have the finest minds in the country harnessing the data to make a difference. That is why we are also setting up a new health data research service by the end of this year. It will provide a secure single access point for researchers, including data relevant to cancer diagnosis, care and outcomes. That means that wherever they live in our country, whether Washington, Wokingham or Durham, scientists will be sitting on a treasure trove of data for their research. Our life sciences sector plan commits us to working with industry to accelerate growth in spending on innovative medicines. Just last year, a cutting edge oral targeted cancer therapy that helps to slow or stop cell growth was approved for treating advanced breast cancer on the NHS in England.
I turn to some specific points made by hon. Members. The hon. Members for Horsham (John Milne) and for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) spoke about lobular breast cancer and the Lobular Moon Shot Project. I assure the House that Government funders are committed to continuing to work with researchers to support the development of fundable research proposals to drive a stronger understanding of the biology behind lobular breast cancer, as well as to develop effective treatments. In April, Lord Vallance and I, alongside the National Institute for Health and Medical Research Council representatives, met representatives of the Lobular Moon Shot Project. It was a very interesting meeting, I must say. Lord Vallance will also host a scientific roundtable on lobular breast cancer this month—one of the commitments we made at that meeting.
My hon. Friend the Member for West Lancashire spoke about the cancer clinical trials accelerator. I assure her that the Department, NHS England and the NIHR are working hard to develop and set up the accelerator to the timeline set out in the national cancer plan.
The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) asked me once again about clinical trials at Queen’s University Belfast and what discussions Ministers had had with Northern Ireland Ministers. I commit to writing to him with further information on that matter. His plea at the end for more screening, more funding and more saving of lives did not fall on deaf ears for anyone in this Chamber, I am sure.
It has been a privilege to respond on behalf of the Government today. I have spent the best part of 20 to 30 years—21 years of them in this place—fighting alongside campaigners on this issue, along with many others. Now I am in government, they are all at the forefront of my mind. When it comes to cancer, colleagues are pushing at an open door with me. I will never forget my roots as chair of the all-party group and as a daughter-in-law of someone lost to secondary breast cancer at far too young an age. The hon. Member for Wokingham has a very personal connection to this campaign, and the all-party group could not be in better hands with him as its chair.
Let me end by thanking all hon. Members for keeping me on my toes. If I have not responded to any points made by the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson), or by others, I commit to doing so in writing. I look forward to working with all Members in the months and years ahead as we take forward this important work.